


Acknowledging Certain Things

by Krasimer



Series: And Now a Flower Grows 'Verse [14]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Minor Sans/Toriel (Undertale), Nonbinary Frisk (Undertale), Parent Sans (Undertale), Parent Toriel (Undertale), Sad Frisk (Undertale), Selectively Mute Frisk (Undertale), Teacher Toriel (Undertale)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-21 19:35:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18146510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Krasimer/pseuds/Krasimer
Summary: It hadn't occurred to him, before, that he was a dad now.Not until the idea was shoved at him.(He would do what he could to protect them.)





	Acknowledging Certain Things

It had only been a few months after Toriel and Sans had started dating.

Frisk had been formally adopted for some time but starting at a new school had been put off while their new family settled in further. Toriel herself had been busy putting together the school for the monster kids, preparing to be both headmaster and teacher. She had always wanted to be a teacher, Sans thought as he watched over Frisk and Flowey in the yard, one day.

That had been something he’d learned over the time talking to her through the door.

But Frisk finally made it into a new school after about six months on the surface. Their first day had been spent watching Papyrus get sniffly over his little human friend going elsewhere for most of the day. Sans had been making sure that food made it into the kid’s backpack and that Flowey wasn’t going with them.

The two had been upset about the separation, but Flowey was going to be a student in Toriel’s school.

Frisk had smiled, adjusted their backpack, then signed goodbye and walked out the front door to the school that was only five blocks away. Even Sans, slow as he chose to walk, could make it in about twenty minutes. They had a bag of food, papers, crayons, and pencils, and Sans assured Toriel that everything would be fine.

Flowey had gone off with Toriel for that day’s lesson.

Papyrus had gone off to see Mettaton.

Which left Sans alone in the house.

The first couple of hours passed quietly, the soft voices from the television echoing through the house as he caught up on some inane show he’d only ever had the first season of in the Underground. Sans had gotten so used to being lazy, so used to sleeping all the time, that being awake and aware for most of the day had become unusual.

Exhausting.

But on the other side of it, he found himself with a spike of anxious energy, waiting for something to happen. For the world to change, for the timeline to reset and send him back to darkness, loneliness, and perpetually living the same few weeks again and again, over and over. Every day had been a question of how many times he had lived those same hours, days, weeks, sometimes even months. Faking letters for Papyrus and watching Mettaton become even more self-absorbed and listening to Undyne go take a running leap off the deep end.

So he cleaned.

Little things, at first, things he could remember having cared enough to do a long time ago, back when he and Papyrus still had a father and a steady timeline.

The dishes were easy enough.

Vacuuming was easier for him than it was for Toriel and Tori was always so busy, he might as well do it for her.

Mopping was his least favorite thing because of the way he nearly cracked his skull on the table when he slipped in the water. Sans quietly put the mop away and ignored it, after that.

Several hours passed like that.

Fits of cleaning combined with sacking out on the couch and watching the colors flash across the screen, his vision just going hazy enough that he couldn’t really make out distinct shapes anymore. Toriel was still not due home for another three hours, having volunteered to give the other monster children lessons as well. Papyrus had called about an hour ago and said he was going to go see Undyne and Alphys – Sans had gotten the distinct impression that his brother still had Mettaton with him.

And then his phone rang again.

Feeling adventurous, Sans answered the call without looking at the number. “Yellow.”

Nothing from the other end except a strange breathing noise.

“Hello?” Sans frowned, sitting up and putting a hand on the arm of the couch. “Who is this?”

The line crackled and Sans forced himself to keep the phone in his hand instead of throwing it across the room. The crackle had sounded so familiar, like the odd messages that occasionally popped up in the Underground. Frisk had told him about getting one, before.

The noise came again, this time more identifiable: the sound of hitched breathing and a couple of sobs.

Sans stood up for no other reason than he felt the need to right then. “Hey, are you okay?” he paused, waiting for an answer. None came and he spoke again. “Who is this?”

This time, he could hear actual crying.

The sound of it was familiar and Sans felt his soul freeze, like it was trying to eject itself from his body. With a slow turn of his head, he looked at the clock. It was only one, Frisk wasn’t expected home for another hour or so. “Frisk?” he ventured his guess.

The sobbing on the other end of the line grew louder.

_No._

Sans felt the word practically vibrate through his entire being, his free hand clenching into a rattling fist. Something had happened to Frisk.

Frisk was still at school.

Their day had started out _great_ and now he had them on the phone, having gone non-verbal, and quickly falling into a panicked and crying episode. “Frisk,” he told them, crossing the room and kicking off his slippers, sliding his feet haphazardly into his sneakers. “Stay where you are, I’m going to come get you. Do you need me to stay on the phone?”

Some half-formed whimpers sounded, almost like a yes.

“Okay, press one button for yes, two for no.” Sans offered up the usual solution they had devised for when things like that happened. Frisk being required to use their phone when they couldn’t speak had happened too often, but they had a system. “Do you need me to stay on the phone?”

One beep sounded.

“Cool,” Sans left the house, locking it up quickly. “Hey, buddy, just listen to me, okay?” he waited until he heard a whimper again. “Gonna find you, you’re going to be okay,” he couldn’t even think of jokes to tell the kid right then, too worried about them. Frisk wasn’t usually a crier, tended to face everything with resignation and silence. If they were crying, something worse than just plain bad had happened. “We’ll get you home and make some hot chocolate, yeah?”

One more beep. Frisk knew how the system worked, just like Sans did.

Without even thinking about it, Sans walked through one of his ‘shortcuts’ and arrived just outside Frisk’s school. He had been listed as an emergency contact, the secondary one after Toriel, so getting the kid out of whatever was happening wasn’t going to be a problem.

“You still there, kid?” he asked the phone, scanning what he could see of the playground for any glimpse of their newest sweater (Dark blue with purple and pink hearts across the chest. They had been so happy when they had found it at the store). “I’m at the school, now, can you hear me at all?”

Two beeps.

“I’m going to walk around the playground, talking. When you hear me, you make my phone beep at me and I’ll find you okay?” Sans waited until he heard another beep. “Have I ever told you about Papyrus as a little bones?”

Two beeps.

“He was so little for a while, me and—I thought he was going to stay small _forever._ Like, I know you think you’re short, but Papyrus would have only gone up to about your chest.” Sans kept looking around, walking through the playground as he kept telling stories about Papyrus as a little kid. Frisk was still crying, he could hear that through the phone, but their tears seemed to be slowing down. When he ran out of things he could tell the kid without breaking down into his own crying fit, he moved on to stories about some of the other monsters that he knew Frisk had met at some point.

“And Grillby, well,” Sans grinned. “Grillby didn’t find out about me being the person throwing water balloons off the roof of his restaurant until months and months later. Managed to get Paps a couple times, too.”

He stopped in his tracks when he heard it.

One beep.

Okay.

Memories of trying to find Papyrus, little and missing in the snow, too weak to be out and alone for so long, flooded into his mind. Memories of his dad being gone, of never having existed to some people, hit him as well.

In plain sight, he could not see Frisk.

The bushes along the side of the school building, however, twitched and shook. “Kid?” Sans watched the foliage shake when he questioned Frisk.

With a couple of quick, larger-than-usual strides, Sans dropped to his knees next to the bushes, pushing them aside with one arm. Underneath and behind them was Frisk, their phone clutched in their hand and against their face. “Hey, kiddo,” Sans barely dared to breathe the words out, hitting the button to end the call and dropping his phone into his pocket. With that done, he reached out his hand to Frisk. “C’mere, bucko, let’s get you out of there.”

Their hands shaking, they dropped their phone into their bag, tears still streaming down their face. They were trembling too much to even sign anything and their voice was a half-choked sob as they dove from the cover of the bushes into his arms.

Small hands clenched in the fabric of his jacket and Sans settled on the grass with Frisk in his lap. “Kid, what happened?” he leaned down and back a little, to see their face. “Do you feel up to telling me?”

“I—” Frisk choked on air, burying their face in his chest. “ _Dad._ ”

Both eyes going dark for a second, Sans felt his soul pulse in his chest.

_Oh._

Yeah, he kind of was, wasn’t he?

The second contact on the list, trusted with making sure Frisk was okay, Frisk trusting him enough to call him in when something had gone wrong. Asgore was on the contact list as well, seventh down, could have just as easily been called in.

But Frisk had called _him._

Sans couldn’t make himself talk. Instead, he just gathered his bundle of human closer to his chest and held onto Frisk as they continued to cry, their feet patting against the ground and their still-shaking hands curled in his jacket. “Hey, you’re okay,” Sans whispered after a while. He’d once said those same things to Papyrus, when his brother had been having a nightmare. “You’re okay,” he told them.

“You’re safe.”

He never said the words that had planted themselves in his mind and tried to come out:

_Dad’s here, I’ve got you._

Eventually, Frisk stopped crying and pulled away from him, brushing roughly at their own face and scrubbing at the tearstains. Now that he could get a good look at them, Sans almost wished he hadn’t.

Their new sweater was torn and there was a bruise on their face.

Frisk looked ashamed, almost, their hand wrapped around their other arm. They refused to meet his eyes, their legs curled to their chest. One of their knees was bruised as well. Something like the old rage he remembered rose up in his chest, the sort of angry he’d once only gotten because something had happened to Papyrus. Drawing on deep wells of patience and temper control he somehow still had after all the time that had passed, Sans nodded. “Okay, well, we’re going home now,” he stood up, helping Frisk to their feet. “Grab your backpack, kiddo, we _goat_ stuff to ask your mom.” He watched as Frisk giggled, pulling their backpack on and sticking close to his side.

Arriving in the office was easy, with his shortcuts. Once there, Sans looked at Frisk. “Can you stick this out in that chair, there?” he gestured towards one near the door. “I’ve got to talk to someone.”

Frisk nodded and went, curling up as small as they could with their bag clutched to their chest.

Sans grinned at them, then turned to the woman behind the desk. Her hair was cut in what he thought might have been a fashionable bob or something like that with hair dye over the obvious grey in it. “My name is Sans,” he told her, waiting for her to look up. “I’m here to sign my kid out of school for the day.”

“Do you have proof of your relation to the child—” she made it halfway through the droning sentence before she actually looked up and saw him.

“Yeah,” Sans grinned at her. “Frisk. Toriel the goat monster’s kid. I’m their second contact, Sans. Sans the _skeleton._ ” He let his left eye go a brilliant shining blue. “And seeing as someone _attacked_ my kid, I feel personally justified in _taking them home._ ” He clenched his hands on the edge of the counter. “There are bruises on them and there is a ripped sweater and I want to know which little _nugget_ of your _precious_ human children did that. Other than that, yeah, I just want to take my kid _home._ ”

The woman stared at him, then nodded slowly. “I can sign Frisk out here, sir.”

“Good,” Sans let his eye go back to normal. “I also want to schedule a meeting with the principal. My partner will want to be here for the sake of our kid, but she’s currently busy with her _job._ ” He hoped enough of his anger was visible in the undertone of his words, his implication of the school staff not doing _theirs_.

“I’ll let her know,” the woman nodded again, hands shaking as she shifted papers on her desk around. “If you could just sign here, then we can put it in our records that Frisk’s parent showed up and took them home.”

Sans did so quickly. “Is that all?”

“Ye-yes,” the woman seemed to shrink back in her seat. When he turned away to gather Frisk up again, he could hear her jerking across the room to the principal’s office, hissing something about having angered the monsters.

“C’mon,” he offered a hand to Frisk, letting them practically cling to his side. “Let’s go home.”

 

Toriel, when Sans and Frisk got home, had apparently come home early.

“Sans?” she looked up when he entered the house, Frisk trailing behind him. “Is everything alright?” she stood up when she saw Frisk, her hands going to her mouth. “Frisk!”

“They’re having a bad time,” Sans put a hand on Frisk’s shoulder, steering them towards Toriel. “I need to talk to you about something and I don’t think you’re going to like it.” He watched as Frisk wrapped their arms around their mother, burying their face in her stomach. “I got a call from Frisk and went to the school to bring them home. That is how I found them.”

Toriel’s mouth was open, surprise and horror warring for control of her expression. He couldn’t blame her, her child had been bruised and was now crying again.

Sans let the two stand there for a few minutes as he started pulling out ingredients to make hot chocolate. “We also have a meeting with the principal, at some point in the future. They’re going to call us about it and we are going to need to go.” He felt himself falling back into speech patterns he hadn’t used since his father had disappeared, like the timeline was connecting the two parts of him back into one whole monster again.

With a nod, Toriel leaned down and scooped Frisk into her arms, holding them close and nuzzling the top of their head. “If that is what must happen, then it must happen,” she smiled at Sans. “Frisk?”

“Muh?” their voice was starting to come back, it seemed. They were probably still in the nonverbal stage, for the most part, but they could start making small noises again. Sans grinned at them. With a wink of his left eye, he reached out a hand and used his magic to drag open a cupboard, pulling down Frisk’s favorite mug.

“Flowey is home as well, if you would like to go see him,” Toriel explained.

Frisk nodded and she walked out of the room with them.

Sans could hear her settling Frisk into a spot on the couch, heard Flowey’s snappish reply about keeping Frisk safe. That had been one of the few good things about retrieving the weed from the Underground – Flowey kept Frisk company. Sans was still a little distrustful of that company, but it was good for Frisk to have someone with them.

When Toriel came back in the room, Sans had put together a mug of hot chocolate, handing it off to her. She disappeared for a few more minutes, giving the mug to Frisk with soft words and what Sans knew would be a smile.

He cleaned everything up quickly, turning around right as she re-entered the kitchen. “They were beaten up at school, today,” he told her, before she could say anything. “They called me from the school and I went and found them and their sweater was torn and they were bruised and—”

Toriel wrapped her arms around him, lifting him up and nuzzling the top of his skull.

It was an effective way to stop his babbling.

“You rescued our child,” she laughed when she pulled away. “Did you think I would be angry about that?” Toriel set him back down, pulling out a chair at the table and settling into it. “When they were telling me about it, they called you their dad.” Her smile grew bigger. “I do not think they noticed.”

“Yeah,” Sans felt his cheeks flush blue, his magic rising to the surface. “They called me that at school, too. I called them my kid when I signed them out at the office.”

“What do you think should be done?”

Sans stuffed both hands into his pockets, walking towards her and leaning against the table. “I think they shouldn’t be going to the human school, honestly.” He shrugged. “They’ve lived with monsters long enough that they’re used to it, they’re a magic user – I mean, when we got out, they were using magic like yours to keep everyone safe. And I know they were running away from _something_ when they dropped into the Underground.

Toriel nodded. “So you think our child should be a student at the school I am putting together?”

“Yeah.” Sans nodded. “I know they’d probably feel safer. We should also ask them about it.”

He went to shrug again, then stopped.

_Our child._

Toriel had used those specific words a couple of times in reference to Frisk.

From the way she was grinning, she knew he’d finally caught on. He was a part of the family and this was her way of reinforcing that. Sans hadn’t expected to be a father, had barely ever expected to get out of the Underground alive and sane, and here were two of the most important people in his life telling him he was a _dad._

It made him feel a little dizzy.

He wasn’t sure he knew how to be a dad. His own had disappeared, after all, and he could only do his best with Papyrus.

“Sans?”

“I’m not sure I’m A-plus dad material,” he tried to play it off nonchalantly, like it didn’t matter at all. The churning in his SOUL said otherwise, however, and he stifled a sound that tried to squeak out of him. Frisk was his kid, he wasn’t ever going to give up that claim, but he wasn’t great as a dad. How Papyrus had survived seemed almost like a magic act to him.

Toriel made a soft noise in the back of her throat and took his hands in her own. “Sans,” she smiled, kindness and joy and happiness. “Do you really think you have been anything but a father all this time?”

“I—What?”

“You keep them safe when they have nightmares,” Toriel began. “You make them hot chocolate and tell them jokes until they laugh, you know when to let them have their own space and some time to recover enough to come to you about what is wrong. You scheduled an appointment with their school principal to discuss pulling them from a school where it is proven that they are going to be mistreated.” She raised his hands and nuzzled against them. “You were the one they called when they were afraid and hurt.”

Sans couldn’t keep himself from remembering how it had happened in the Underground – Frisk running from Undyne, right past him, with a look of fear on their face and an angry fish monster on their tail.

He had been distrusting of them at the time, after so many resets.

But the image of them, afraid and nearly crying, had stuck with him. The same as when they had made it to the hall before meeting Asgore. They had tapped him on the head with the stick, their face crumpling into a tear-stained mess.

Once he had gotten them to calm down some, they had explained, ‘ _everyone else I’ve met has attacked me. I thought you were going to do the same’._

Despite that, despite how little he had actually helped them, despite how many times he’d had to watch them die and they knew it, Frisk still thought of him as dad. Subconscious enough that they signed it to Toriel. That they would call him that when they were afraid and hurting, when they were scared. “Can we continue talking about this later?” he asked Toriel.

“Yes,” she nodded, still smiling as she let go of his hands.

Sans practically ran to the next room, coming to a stop in front of Frisk. _Yeah,_ he thought as he watched them tilt their head up to stare at him, wrapped in a thick blanket with Flowey on the table next to the arm of the couch. _That’s my kid._

“You can always call me,” he told them, watching their small hands wrap tightly around the mug they were holding. “If you’re scared or hurt or just want to talk, okay?”

Frisk set down their mug and held out their arms.

Sans wrapped his arms around them and held on tight, trying to deal with the fountain of emotions flooding his chest.

**Author's Note:**

> So...Sans is a dad and you cannot take that from me.


End file.
